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What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

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Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#11

Post by eloff »

chomp wrote: post #3
Xcelerate wrote: post #2

It sure would be cool to see someone successfully develop a new smart city. The idea has been proposed many, many times, but at least in the U.S. it never seems to work out for some reason (and it appears in Canada as well). I would love to see a new city designed from the ground up on some currently uninhabited plot of land. You could make it walkable, beautiful, design it to have higher density housing from the sta…

The problem is the "smart" part of it - if it's smart in the sense that it was properly planned around something other than the automobile, then sure, I think you can get a lot of people on board. All the stuff in your comment sounds great. The problem is when you start adding cameras and electronics. It's obvious Sidewalk Labs is just an arm of the Google data collection funnel. I don't want any part of that in my l…

I think the cameras and electronics are great. A good way to reduce crime as opposed to adding more police. It's worked well in London to the best of my knowledge and I think we could use more of that in general.

What I object to is Google being the one entrusted with this data, with no oversight, and cross-referencing it with all the other data they have on me.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#12

Post by aSplash0fDerp »

The best part about new 21st century cities being built from scratch is kindergarten for tenure with primary services.

Resetting tenure for a new century solves 99% of the problems with trying to build on-top of inefficiency (schools, public utilities, local government, etc).

Toronto would have been better off with a sister city, developing a DFW-like economic area for the future instead of accelerating urban rot.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#13

Post by an_opabinia »

> transforming what had previously been an area east of downtown Toronto characterized by desolate parking lots and the graffiti-strewn foundations of demolished buildings

Guess Toronto got its crap back.

> Affordable housing was a top concern among Toronto residents before the pandemic, and in the economic fallout it will only grow as a priority, she said, as an example.

It’s ironic. At least in technology, the way consumer prices declined in the last two decades has been through ads and data - by selling ad inventory inside apps and websites, and buying ads to reach targeted people more affordably.

Regardless of how you feel about data and surveillance and privacy or whatever, at least ad targeting has a long proven track record of actually delivering low real prices to consumers.

The only other thing I can think of that is as effective at reducing prices is software and media piracy. So maybe prices are a reductive lens. Then it should be obvious that affordability of housing is too a reductive lens. It can’t be both ways.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#14

Post by jpgleeson »

Xcelerate wrote: post #2

It sure would be cool to see someone successfully develop a new smart city. The idea has been proposed many, many times, but at least in the U.S. it never seems to work out for some reason (and it appears in Canada as well). I would love to see a new city designed from the ground up on some currently uninhabited plot of land. You could make it walkable, beautiful, design it to have higher density housing from the sta…

New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions. Brasilia is a good example of the sort of planned city that would be built. Widespread availability of cars positioned them as the symbols of modernity and so the city was designed around the car, resulting in an entirely unwalkable city that segregates the classes. See also Chandigarh. Barcelona is the main counter example that springs to mind for me.

Every time this is brought up I fail to understand how people think that this time would be any different. Cities are agglomerations of patterns at every scale and the emergent beauty that arises is absolutely impossible to design in any sort of masterplan way. Organic cities are resilient in ways that we can't every really understand, and that's the important element in making a place that is livable for the longer term.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#15

Post by xnx »

an_opabinia wrote: post #13

> transforming what had previously been an area east of downtown Toronto characterized by desolate parking lots and the graffiti-strewn foundations of demolished buildings Guess Toronto got its crap back. > Affordable housing was a top concern among Toronto residents before the pandemic, and in the economic fallout it will only grow as a priority, she said, as an example. It’s ironic. At least in technology, the way…

Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the technology price value trend. Housing today is barely better in terms of quality or value from 50 years ago. To expect housing to improve as fast as handheld devices is unrealistic, but I think they should be improving at around the same rate as cars.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#16

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

etimberg wrote: post #7

As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google is 110% the wrong company to be involved. Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house? If Google, or any other…

My big problem from the beginning was that the money flow made no sense. Why should Toronto be paying for a Google experiment? Google benefitted far more than any other party involved, and that felt slimy.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#17

Post by dkarl »

I don't know why people are surprised at the "failure" of these ambitious projects. Complex systems of technology, culture, and political consent do not get built from the ground up in a few years.

If you bypass political consent, and the only culture that matters is the culture inside a hierarchical controlling organization, then of course you can impose anything and call it a success. It's frightening that Google (let's not get distracted by corporate name games) expected this, but perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. It's what they get from their users every day. All they wanted was to do in physical space what they did on the web: set up a system of technological surveillance and have people embrace it for the conveniences they could build on top.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#18

Post by treis »

jpgleeson wrote: post #14
Xcelerate wrote: post #2

It sure would be cool to see someone successfully develop a new smart city. The idea has been proposed many, many times, but at least in the U.S. it never seems to work out for some reason (and it appears in Canada as well). I would love to see a new city designed from the ground up on some currently uninhabited plot of land. You could make it walkable, beautiful, design it to have higher density housing from the sta…

New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions. Brasilia is a good example of the sort of planned city that would be built. Widespread availability of cars positioned them as the symbols of modernity and so the city was designed around the car, resulting in an entirely unwalkable city that segregates the classes. See also Chandi…

>New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions.

I can think of Washington DC and Salt Lake City that were planned and aren't disasters.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#19

Post by notatoad »

aSplash0fDerp wrote: post #12

The best part about new 21st century cities being built from scratch is kindergarten for tenure with primary services. Resetting tenure for a new century solves 99% of the problems with trying to build on-top of inefficiency (schools, public utilities, local government, etc). Toronto would have been better off with a sister city, developing a DFW-like economic area for the future instead of accelerating urban rot.

>is kindergarten for tenure with primary services.

i know what those words mean, but not in this context. what does this mean?

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#20

Post by an_opabinia »

xnx wrote: post #15
an_opabinia wrote: post #13

> transforming what had previously been an area east of downtown Toronto characterized by desolate parking lots and the graffiti-strewn foundations of demolished buildings Guess Toronto got its crap back. > Affordable housing was a top concern among Toronto residents before the pandemic, and in the economic fallout it will only grow as a priority, she said, as an example. It’s ironic. At least in technology, the way…

Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the technology price value trend. Housing today is barely better in terms of quality or value from 50 years ago. To expect housing to improve as fast as handheld devices is unrealistic, but I think they should be improving at around the same rate as cars.

If people wanted affordable housing, they are more likely to achieve it by letting some company monetize frankly meaningless, actually worthless data about urban living than by taxing people who don’t live there.

In the very least, the economic forces discounting the rents in the former scenario have a chance to scale massively, while tax funded public housing developments have been shrinking almost everywhere in market real estate cities.

The status quo of compelling developers to make below market housing while simultaneously reducing public housing units is on net reducing affordable housing units per capita everywhere.

Sidewalk Labs never advocated this though. They wanted to build essentially luxury developments. Maybe they would be a little cheaper than otherwise. People want to live in luxury apartments and not public housing!

The issue is not simple nor black and white. It’s just that the activists had an opportunity with Sidewalk Labs, who could have simply offered lower rents in exchange for data collection, that they will not have with any other alternative real estate developer, who have no positive ROI reason to offer below market housing.

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